Fool's Fate (Tawny Man #3)

Fool's Fate (Tawny Man #3) Page 337

She turned and looked back at me. I spoke from the heart. “I don't know what to do. I want you to at least know me as a person. Burrich was your father and he did well at it. Perhaps it's too late for me to have that place in your life. Nor can I find a place in your mother's life for me. I love her still, just as much as I did when she left me. I thought then that, when all my tasks were done, I would find her and somehow we would be happy together. And here we are, sixteen years later, and I still haven't managed to find my way back to her.”

She stood, her hand on the door, looking uncomfortable. Then she said, “Perhaps you are telling these things to the wrong woman.” And she slipped quietly out of it, letting it close behind her.

A few days later, Riddle found me at the guards' table eating breakfast. He slid onto the bench opposite me. “Nettle has given me a letter to deliver to her mother and brothers. She said to take it whenever I made my next journey for you.” He reached across the table and took a hunk of bread from my plate. He bit into it and asked with his mouth full, “Will that be soon?”

I thought about it. “Tomorrow morning,” I suggested.

He nodded. “I thought it might be about then.”

I rode Myblack down to the market in Buckkeep Town, chaffering with her all the way. She had had half a year with a stable boy whose idea of exercising her was to take her out and let her run as much as she wanted and then bring her back. She was willful and rude, tugging at her bit and ignoring the rein. I was ashamed of myself for neglecting her. I visited the winter market and rode home with sugared ginger and two arm lengths of red lace. I put them in a basket with a purloined bottle of dandelion wine. I sat all night with a piece of good paper in front of me and managed to find three sentences. “I remember you in red skirts. You climbed up the beach cliffs in front of me, and I saw your bare, sandy ankles. I thought my heart would leap out of my chest.” I wondered if she would even remember that long-ago picnic when I had not even dared to kiss her. I sealed the note with a blotch of wax. Four times I unsealed it, trying to think of better words. Eventually, I entrusted it to Riddle as it was, and walked about for the next four days wishing I hadn't.

On the fourth night, I worked the lever that opened the door in Nettle's bedchamber. I did not go in and summon her, as Chade had me. Instead, I went halfway down those steep steps and left a candle burning there. Then I went back up and waited.

The wait seemed to last forever. I do not know which wakened her at last, the light or the draft, but I finally heard her hesitant tread on the stair. I had built up the fire well in the comfortable end of the room.

She peered round the corner of the concealed door, saw me, but still came in cautious as a cat. She walked slowly past the worktable with the stained scrolls stretched out on it, and more slowly past the work hearth with its racks of tongs and measures and stained pans. She came at last to the chairs by the fireside. She had on a nightgown and a woven shawl across her shoulders. She was shivering.

“Sit down,” I invited her, and she did, slowly. “This is where I work,” I told her. The kettle was just on the boil and I asked her, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I do a lot of my work in the middle of the night.”

“Most people sleep then.”

“I am not like most people.”

“That's so.” She stood up and studied the items on the mantel above the hearth. There was a carving of the wolf that the Fool had done, and next to it, the memory stone with a similar image turned face out. She touched the handle of the fruit knife embedded there and gave me a puzzled glance. Then she reached up and set her hand to the hilt of Chivalry's sword.

“You can take it down if you like. It was your grandfather's. Be careful. It's heavy.”

She took her hand away. “Tell me about him.”

“I can't.”

“Is it another secret, then?”

“No. I can't tell you because I never knew him. He gave me to Burrich when I was five or six. I never saw him, that I can recall. I believe he looked in on me with the Skill from time to time, through Verity's eyes. But I knew nothing of that, then.”

“It sounds like you and me,” she said slowly.

“Yes, it does,” I admitted. “Except that I have a chance to know you now. If we are both bold enough to take it.”

“I'm here,” she pointed out, settling deeper into the chair. And then she fell silent and I could not think of anything to say. Then she pointed at the Fool's carving. “Is that your wolf? Nighteyes?”